Utility functions to simplify STV import

[dflachbart]

Hi everyone,

I don't know if this is true for everyone, but since I started Studio development and writing my own plugins I soon discovered that certain tasks are always tedious and time consuming. To make my life easier I started to factor out certain functionality into java code which has grown to a java library over time. E.g., I found that a quite common task is to find an existing widget in the current STV which one will link to or modify. If it's a theme or a menu this is still relatively easy by using studio widgets (provided the name is unique), but to find arbitray nodes walking through the tree using widget code is quite cumbersome. A function in the library which takes a path to the widget makes this rather pretty easy:

e.g. to get a reference to the 'TV Details' panel of the OSD menu you can simply write

panel = df_sageutils_Import_findExistingWidget("MediaPlayer OSD/DisplayInfo/DetailedInfo/mf = GetCurrentMediaFile()/IsTVFile(mf)/true/TV Details")


The path parameter consists of the names of all widgets along the path. If there is no ambiguity, you can use wildcards to save typing:

panel = df_sageutils_Import_findExistingWidget("MediaPlayer OSD/Disp*/Detail*/mf =*/IsTV*/true/TV Details")


You can even omit the intermediate path altogether (but not recommended for large subtrees which go into breadth instead of depth) :

panel = df_sageutils_Import_findExistingWidget("MediaPlayer OSD//TV Details")


This function alone saves me a lot of time compared to coding the same with Studio widgets. The library also contains a bunch of other useful functions like automatic linking of imported widgets (e.g. themes) to existing ones, a tree deletion routine which can handle loops and does not leave any orphaned nodes behind, or simple one-line calls to retrieve existing/imported menus, hooks, and themes by name.


Just wanted to throw this out here in case anyone would be interested to use it. I haven't written any documentation yet, but I could generate some javadoc if there is demand for that.

Dirk